Long-term Reg aficionados will be aware that roughly once a year we nag you, our beloved readership, into completing a demographic survey the better to understand just who's popping on down to the site, their likes and dislikes, and how we can improve The Register.
So, if you want to chip in your two bits' worth and give us …

Page:

IT angle

Stop the Americanised nonsense...

Dear El-Reg,

I visit The Register because I got used to coming here years ago when this was the best place to get a British perspective on IT and Technology related issues.

In the past couple of years, you have been going down the route of all other sites. You have become heavily Americanised, and as a result, I don't trust what you say nearly as much as I used to, and I don't enjoy reading The Register nearly as much as I used to.

The best thing you can do is return to your British roots. Either make all your American correspondents use British spelling (-ise not -ize, colour not color etc etc) and British currency (use the £ as the first currency you quote - convert that to Dollars and Euros if you must), or sack the lot of them.

Re: Stop the Americanised nonsense...

Er, no.

It has always been Reg house style for our US staff to be permitted to write in US English, and for our UK staff to write in UK English. We realise that the logic of this tends to fall apart when staff switch continents but don't switch spelling, or when they return totally confused after a longish stint on the other side. But we regard this as one of our defining eccentricities, and we're rather proud of it.

Re[2]: Stop the Americanised nonsense...

OK John, In that case, drop "theregister.co.uk", make yourselves a ".com", start writing entirely in American English and go the whole way towards proving that there is absolutely no regard for British English and British Currency in your articles.

The use of American English is not "eccentric", it's annoying. The use of the US Dollar as the primary currency you report in is more than annoying, it's infuriating.

Being "proud" of these "eccentricities" is like being proud of your pet dog for shitting in your lap!

any chance..

.com vs .co.uk etc etc

@AC

Have you tried running the "American" pages through babelfish or google translation to get them into "English"?

As for the currency units surely we can come up with a Register standard unit for this that we'd all understand. Eg 1RFR (Register Friday Round consisting of 2 bitters, a Guinness, 2 scumpys and a packet of pork scratchings)

Survey

Next time please note in the intro that if you don't know what the other 10k people and dozens of IT departments in your organization plan for the next year you won't be able to answer half of the questions...

@AC

@AC RE: .com vs .co.uk

HAVE YOU GONE MAD?

Most people in this country are civilised and understand that the Americans cannot speak English and there is no such thing as US English. However the idea of telling El Reg to go .com just because some of their reporters are in America is insane.

El Reg - can you please find more things for your British correspondents to talk about. At the same time tell your American people to post a warning at the top of the page.

Carry On

The only thing I'd change is a more consistant style applied to the various sister sites (Hardware I'm looking at you)

Really the re-design was a bit poor in my opinion, oh and add some links on each site so you can navigate to the other sites, if I get to a hardware story via RSS I might want to spend more time on your site, and a handy link would be much appreciated.

As I put all that in my submitted survey there goes my anonymity, but as the great and wise Kryten once said "It's such an important point I thought it was worth mentioning twice"

Oh and spell things however you want, so long as the story is valid I've no problem with how it's spelt.

"Americanised"? *sigh*

Americanized?

@AC (the idiot up top complaining about all the news from...the country that dominates the IT industry....which BTW some of us are very grateful for - seeing how it helps give a better understanding of how the industry is going)

You seem to have a malfunction in your thinking centres - I suggest you have a quick fsck of yourself - considering all the good informative articles that come from El Reg the spelling of a few words is hardly worth loosing any sleep over is it?

Lets be honest - how many British web developers out there can actually spell (align=) "center" and "color" (:#000000) in the Queens proper English, without really thinking about it?

british spelling

Actually something, i forgot to put it into my survey can you please for the love of all that is holy (i.e. The pub!) put a UK spell check on your .co.uk website!! Stop with these americanised spellings now!!

Agree with AC

The british angle is key to El Reg - otherwise it's the same as a crap load of other sites. The witty, zany banter with various ironic comments is why I love El Reg.

Not quite as hung up about it as AC, but I agree that keeping in line with the whole British culture around the site (with anyone welcome of course) we should have a single lanugage and dialect to read - British/UK English. It's a British site, based in London with the majority (i'm guessing) of content written by Brits. Keep all the writters, but just set the spell checker to UK English only.

And sort out those fecking adverts. Stop running them OVER the content. I come here to read the content, not to have some irritating Javascript advert 'float' across the page till I click it.

Finally, you have lots of links to the sister sites (or shouldn't that be daughter sites?) from El Reg.co.uk, but it doesn't appear to be as easy to go back to El Reg once your on it. Could be mistaken, but if you go direct to Reg Hardware or Developer there's no easily found hyperlink to theregister.co.uk

@GrahamT

Back in the good old days...

...surveys used to have incentives for filling them in, like maybe a prize draw with, i dunno, a frickin' iPod or something?

In the last couple of weeks I've been asked to fill in surveys about my satisfaction with my employer, my employer's outsourced IT support people, and numerous software vendors I've dealt with over the last year, plus my comments have been sought on various colleagues for their end-of-year appraisals. Any bounty on offer for complying? Nope. Not a sausage.

@Fred

No

My time is precious. At least give me an unlikely chance at winning a shabby prize, and let me engage in some cognative dissonance. I appreciate the 'chummy with our readers' atitude as much as anybody else, but even my bezzy mate has to occasionally offer me stuff to get me to socialise.

Hmm

Doesn't it make you feel a bit lacking, intellectually, if you stumble over a missing (or extra) u or a reversed r and e?

As for currency, it seems to me that, usually, the stories give prices in the appropriate currency for wherever they are reporting about (for instance, the recent article about the German ruling that T-Mobile does not need to sell the unlocked iPhones gave the prices in Euros, plus conversions into USD and GBP) - surely this is the most appropriate standard to follow, since conversion rates are inherently fluid, whereas local prices generally remain fixed for relative long durations. If a piece of kit is made by an American company with a m.s.r.p. of $1000, then shouldn't its price be listed as $1000 (£486, €678)? That is its price, after all. If it is manufactured in India instead, and the manufacturer provides the m.s.r.p. in Rupees, then the price should be listed thus, with any conversions (probably to $, £, and €) there purely for the convenience of the reader.

As for spell check.. install wordnet on your computer.. then you can spell check with US English, UK English, CA English, AU English, or even (if you make your own dictionary) Engrish, to your heart's content.

It's AmericaniZed

for what it's worth

I'm an American who enjoys reading the Reg more so than any of the other trade rags (on-line or hard copy) simply because of the writers and the reader comments. Personally, I don't care where the website is based out of or whom its run by, I enjoy the product that is provided. Granted, the UK is one of the few European countries I blindly respect, it wouldn't matter to me if the Reg was based out of Norway, Finland, Holland, Italy, Belgium, Luxemburg or Japan. I'd still enjoy it.

You don't like me, simply because I'm an American, fine... Chances are I'm not going to lose a whole lot of sleep over it, but what the hell, everybody is entitled to be an idiot, simply because of their own personal bias.

Reporting on currency

"Either make all your American correspondents use British spelling (-ise not -ize, colour not color etc etc) and British currency (use the £ as the first currency you quote - convert that to Dollars and Euros if you must), or sack the lot of them."

I thought it was tradition in press that when you report on an amount of money for another country (such as USD $1,000) you report initially on that amount then convert it to your local equivalent. It seems silly to me that if someone was fined $1,000 in the states, you report that first then convert it... otherwise you'd be saying something along the lines of "Bob was fined 492 pounds ($1,000 USD)", which is inaccurate reporting due to exchange rate changes etc.

@ The Aussie Paradox

Australianisms won't work on an overseas site as

Take the following extract from the 'Aussie Citizenship Test' that was emailed around.

"Macca, Chooka and Wanger are driving to Surfers in their Torana. If they are travelling at 100 km/h while listening to Barnsey, Farnsey and Acca Dacca, how many slabs will each person on average consume between flashing a brown eye and having a slash?"

I suspect quite a few overseas ppl will be confused, where as an Aussie will smile and remember their youth...

Print my comments!

..more often. I want the right to speak freely for free at your cost and my privilege. That is, to sound off how I like and when I like!

And tidy up your front page - it's impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff, meaning segregate your story titles by colour or something so we can tell their category straight off without having to read them all in detail firstly. Plus, make the date more prominent - old news shouldn't be as prominent as today's news. Put a dateline separating the day's stories maybe.

And where's the financial incentive to complete your ten minute questionnaire? Eh? I want to see prizes and plenty of them!

Otherwise you're doing a pretty good job in the main. I have lots of ideas. But they will cost you dearly*.

This is great, but...

enough with the naysayers

Despite all the flaming above, keep up the good work being the best source of UK/OZ/USA tech news! If any of the readers are unable to understand the subtle differences in the language or currencies, well are you sure that you should be working in IT? I think sales needs a new drone or two....

Peronally.....

Couldnt give a rats arse what people think about the US spelling!

Letz b onst ere we av spwnd sum kinda chav spk here innit!

I would rather read yank (err no offence guys i am a big fan of the US and actually might get the oppurtunity to visit on a holiday (or vacation as you know it ;-) ) next year if i am lucky!) than that kind of dribble! For now i will raise a beer to the reg another year and another good excuse to be surfing the net from work. This is one of the few sites i can sit on all day having it open and not get whinged at! My boss even emailed round a link or after i forwarded them on!

I would like to oppurtunity to win more from you guys and dont tell me you have nothing, the freebies you guys must recieve even if they are crap...pens, notepads etc must be worth chucking out on a survey win!

Survey Response

At the risk of coming off as one of millions of fawning Reg sycophants, I happily took the time out from juggling scads of real and virtual servers to complete the survey. I have gotten a heads-up here on many issues relating to my industry, and the droll humourous writing is entertaining in its own right.

Please don't change nuthin'. I'd wager a pint of good stout that the percentage of readers responding to the survey was significantly higher than that of most tech news sites.